Rock Climbing Safety: How to Rescue a Child Climber. Standard Practices DO NOT Apply!
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If you’ve been following our channel, you know that I am a big believer in having teams that are self-sufficient. And to me, part of what self-sufficiency means being able to manage situations and eventualities. First, being self-sufficient adds in a safety margin, as I feel like my team and I are prepared to appropriately react when things go wrong… and things can go wrong in uncontrolled environments like the wild places. Second, being self-sufficient allows me an my team the freedom to explore those wild places, as due to the added safety margin, we don’t need to be reliant on the masses to assist. So, self-sufficiency opens up the world, literally. Third, being self-sufficient is just - frankly - the moral thing to do. When situations go badly, they can snowball; and I would rather take on the burden of dealing with a snowballing situation than have someone else put themselves into it. Better to have one team at risk than two - if we can avoid it.
So, when my family is my team, that does place extra burden on me because the kids aren’t really in a position to be able to get themselves out of any bad situation that we may have gotten ourselves into. It’s my responsibility, then, to be knowledgeable enough and skilled enough to help manage everyone’s risk. One of the ways I do that is by being prepared to deal with the situations we all hope we don’t have to deal with.
We’ve been building a series of posts around these four basic skills that all must be mastered so that we are capable of stringing them together should one of our worst possible situations arise: having a kid get injured while up on their climb:
Transition to descending the rope (without putting the injured climber or you in any greater risk)
Get the injured climber on your descending system and take them down with you (this video)
And, so we’ve ended this short series with the penultimate sequence of getting the climber down when I can’t use their rope. This is one of the strange peculiarities of climbing with kids. The standard rescue sequence, known as “the pick-off,” isn’t applicable because it demands that the climber and the belayer counter-balance each other on the single climbing rope. Well, with a small kids, that counter-balance can’t happen. So, I need an alternative.
That need to know something “non-standard” because of - in this case - the weight differential between climber and belayer, was the impetus behind making this short series of videos and also factors into the specific gear I choose to have with me on a climb:
Petzl Grigri+ (new version)
Petzl Tibloc (new version)
Sterling Hollow Block (19 inches)
Mammut Dyneema Contact Sling (120 cm)
Mammut Togir 3 Slide Harness (new model)
It all might be overkill when things are nominal, but if things cease to be, it is - after all - ultimately my responsibility to be able to deal with the situation. I’m the parent, and I put us all here.